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Category Archives: Reviews

Unravel 2 review

Thursday, 14 June 2018 15:28
Written by Tarryn van der Byl
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You must’ve felt it. You know, like when you’re browsing the internet and, omg, there it is. It’s a photo of a kitten, wrapped up in some ragged scraps of toilet paper, its enormous, glittering eyesies almost bulging with purity and innocence and the most immaculate virtue, its so ferocious clawsies grasping at the camera, its floopsy bellysies wibbling your womblies.

AND YOU CAN’T EVEN AND YOU GET SO MAD AND YOU WANT TO SQUEEZE THE SHIT OUT OF IT, GRIND IT UP, AND SNORT IT.

It’s a real thing. And it’s also the defining feature of Unravel 2.

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Sega Mega Drive Classics review

Wednesday, 13 June 2018 11:37
Written by Matthew Vice
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I got my Mega Drive for Christmas after I finished primary school, when local retailers were pushing the console, along with the recently released port of Mortal Kombat – which was the first game I got with it. After my bloodlust was sated, I turned my attention to the vast library of other games on the machine.

That nostalgia-laden segue was obviously to prompt my review of the recently released Sega Mega Drive Classics collection, a compilation of over 50 games from Sega’s old 16-bit console. After going through the catalogue of titles I was reminded of a feeling I’d long forgotten – the feeling of not being able to acquire a game. Back in the Mega Drive’s heyday, I was a penniless schoolboy who could only swing maybe two new games a year on my birthday and Christmas, so I missed out on vast chunks of the Mega Drive library.

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Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection review

Tuesday, 12 June 2018 11:52
Written by Matthew Vice
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I have kind of a love/hate relationship with Street Fighter V. I love the way it plays, but I hate many other things about it – such as the way Capcom decided to release it in chunks and, because the local online fighting community is small and sparse, a lack of a decent single player mode. And don’t even try to bring up that atrocious arcade mode they finally patched in for us, with its ridiculously long load times, no option to continue without going back to the character select for yet more load times, and the bizarre fragmentation of the roster into various themed arcade modes – just give us a basic arcade mode with no frills and the quickest load times you can manage, you idiots!

So, as much as I love Street Fighter V’s actual play mechanics, during the times when no human opponents are to be found, I tend to get my single player versus fighting jollies elsewhere – The King of Fighters, Mark of the Wolves, The Last Blade… Mostly SNK games, come to think of it. It’s not because they’re inherently better or anything, it’s just that SNK has supported us pretty well with their single player-friendly retro archive of the last few years. If only Capcom would release their retro fighting games – oh wait.

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Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon review

Thursday, 31 May 2018 11:37
Written by Matthew Vice
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At least some good came from the whole Konami debacle – namely some of their top developers jumping ship to found their own studios and work on their own new games. One of them was Koji Igarashi, one of the prominent developers of the seminal 1997 platformer Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. The first game by his new studio, Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, looks very similar to his 1997 hit and is due out some time this year. I can’t wait.

In the meantime, Igarashi hired the studio Inti Creates to develop a small, retro-themed prequel game to tide us over – a direct result of his crowd-funding campaign doing really well. It’s called Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon, and it’s pretty good if you like really old school gameplay. If Ritual of the Night comes out and is also good, it will be a rare Kickstarter success story, so let’s hope.

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Detroit: Become Human review

Thursday, 24 May 2018 14:00
Written by Miklós Szecsei
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Although we didn’t realise it at the time, Detroit: Become Human has existed in some form for the last seven years. In 2012, Quantic Dream unveiled a seven-minute tech demo running in real-time on a PlayStation 3. The demo, which was a year old when it was shown at GDC, was meant as a starting point for a discussion on the merits of using live actors to portray characters in video games. It was an exploratory topic that by today’s mo-capped-riddled game design standards seems rather quaint. I remember being enamoured with the “Kara” tech demo and the possibilities of playing games in which characters displayed convincing, emotional responses to gameplay actions. Of course, Quantic Dream went on to release the Ellen Page thriller Beyond: Two Souls instead, and all hope of a story-driven video game starring super-emotional androids had to be put on ice.

Fast-forward to 2018 and, hey, look! It’s that Kara android from that tech demo from seven years ago! And she’s in a game about androids slowly breaking their programming and becoming self-aware. And game director David Cage is still doing what he does best: creating some pretty great characters and then forcing players to make god-awful choices that leave you feeling very depressed about everything all the time forever because you made bad decisions and look at what a monster you are – you monster.

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